Raw Footage writeup

Hey, so I wanted to sum up some thoughts and lessons learned from Raw Footage.

This was my attempt to improve my animation and get out of my comfort zone, I wanted to achieve this by heavy use of reference. Basically before animating I stitched together the entire movie out of various video clips, mostly using Manuel Ferrara's RAW series (hence the name as well).

This was I had a good starting point that I 'only' needed to copy. I was worried that this would make me dependent on reference but it actually helped me a lot to understand why certain movements work and what makes them look real.

Another lesson was what not to copy. Sometimes directly copying the movement just didn't look right and at first I was a slave to this, where I thought it's if it's in the reference it needs to be in my animation as well, but later realized that it's better to adjust e.g. the timing if it ends up feeling better in the final product.

I also tried to entirely get rid of loops, but once again I found that they definitely have their use, where if I spend some effort making a very nice loop and then varying it, it ends up looking better than just going frame by frame, because I can put in a lot of little details.

Overall I am very happy with the movie, I think it's my best work yet and I feel like it helped me improve. Personally I think you can directly see it in the movie, where the later parts feel better than the earlier ones 😅

One thing that took a hit was my production time, where normally movie of this length would took me maybe 4-5 months while this one took me double of that. I'd say in the end it's worth it to go for quality over quantity and I also believe that I will regain some of the speed in time with practice.

As for new project, the Radroach collab should be ready soon and I am working on a small thing featuring Shadowheart and Laezel. After that I am undecided, thinking about finally picking up one of the older animation challenges and polishing it up into a more coherent story.